The invention relates to detection and locating of heavy machine teeth, specifically the use of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags to determine when a metal tooth is no longer on a bucket of a heavy machine.
Heavy machines (e.g., mining equipment such as draglines and shovels) utilize steel teeth in their bucket designs. The teeth are used for several reasons: They provide a smaller point of surface area when digging into the earth, helping to break up the earth, and requiring less force than the larger surface area of a bucket itself. In addition, the teeth provide easily replaceable wear points that save the bucket itself from wearing down. However, as a tooth wears down, there is currently no method to measure wear without physically removing the tooth.
When the teeth wear down, they typically fall off. The current method of detecting when a tooth falls off is an expensive machine vision system that looks at the bucket and detects when a tooth has gone missing. This system is extremely costly to implement, and only lets the operator know that the tooth has gone missing, not where it is. Once a crew notices a tooth is missing, they haul away an average ten truckloads of material in hopes of locating and separating out the fallen tooth. If they are unable to locate the tooth, the tooth can end up in a crusher. In addition the tooth can become stuck in the crusher and be ejected from the crusher, potentially harming other equipment.